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Quote: A few things about ghost reports that interest me:
Quote: 1. Ghosts generally wear clothes. That's got to mean something.
Quote: Well, TV and movies always portray temperature drops around ghosts. I can't blame them for wanting to throw on a sweater as a result.
One of the best attested folk ghosts of the US is Abraham Lincoln's funeral train. Roughly 1/4 of all Americans then alive turned out to pay their respects as Lincoln's body was driven round the nation and many people today claim to have encountered the ghost train following its original route. A lot vividly describe the low-slung flatbed car with Lincoln coffin on it. And that's strange because the train never looked like that. What it did have was a very distinctive front with a unique cowcatcher that is never noted by modern viewers. Odd, eh?
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Quote: 2. Ghosts that are said to walk on the anniversary of their death seem to have mostly converted to the Gregorian calendar.
Quote: That is true, isn't it? All those leap years and such in between, and they've kept with it. I can hardly keep track of my important dates even with an iphone.
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Quote: 3. The relationship between haunted sites, underground water and tectonic activity seems worthy of further investigation, given our understanding of how electromagentic activity can affect our perceptions.
Quote: I hadn't heard of the connection between ghosts and underground water before. So maybe divining rods really do work, but only when there's a ghost around to point them in the right direction...
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Quote: I've done a few daft things when younger, including a midnight graveyard search for a barghest (a traditional phantom dog in Yorkshire folklore). I once slept the night in a ruined "haunted house" (with Shep actually) but while the place was pretty creepy we didn't actually find any spooks. Plenty of spiders though.
Quote: I'm not sure that spending the night alone in a house with a hot young brunette would qualify as "daft"...
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... Then I suspect that they're affected greatly by both their perceptions and our own.
Ghosts wearing clothing makes perfect sense to me, even though the spirit is stripped of its flesh, because if ghosts are real, then their spirits would, at least to some extent, be a reflection of how they see themselves, and nobody sees themselves as naked in their "default" self-image.
As for why ghosts wouldn't see themselves wildly differently from how they appeared physically in life, I suspect that's where the observers of ghosts come into play, especially with the ghosts of those who are well-known. If Abraham Lincoln's ghost does exist, of course he's going to manifest in a stovepipe hat, because that's what our perceptions have turned him into. If he wants to manifest, then he's going to need to manifest in ways that people who are receptive to seeing him can handle. Thus, if you're a celebrity who dies an old woman, but was best known as a beautiful young thing, you're in luck. If you're Elvis, you've got about 50/50 odds of manifesting as handsome.
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